Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.

Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.

DivX 8.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3

Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:

Our lighter encoding test puts the 965 BE above all of the Core 2 Quads and just behind the i7 920.

x264 HD Video Encoding Performance

Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 codec (open source alternative to H.264) to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.

The 965 BE manages to pull ahead of the i7 920 in the first pass of our test, however the second more strenuous pass clearly goes to the i7. Compared to the Core 2 Quads however, the 965 is without an equal - it's better than the Q9650.

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile

In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.

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58 Comments

amd's only hope to beat the i7s is the istambul core, if it brings istambul to the desktop market, I guess this future cpu can beat some high-end i7 processors, and after some revisions on the deneb core, amd will place it to ''fight'' the i5s leaving the athlon x4 playing against the i3s, but most denebs must be at 95W to be efficient against i5. of course this strategy depends if amd is economically capaple of putting a 300mm squared die in the desktop market...deneb is already too large to compete against the i7!
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You measured performance in video encoding and then power consumption under the same test. Why not take the obvious next step to calculate performance/watt and post those results?

And I was quite disappointed to see that you posted only about half of each CPU list on each of those charts - a few chips overlap but many do not so we cannot even do the calculation for ourselves except in less than half the cases. Reply

FarCry 2 is another example of a title well optimized for Intel's architectures and thus we see that the 965BE can't even win against its Q9550 competition. Thankfully for AMD, I do not believe FarCry 2 is representative of the majority of titles on the market.

I believe this is an example of how SSE extentions deliver; but looking at the game benchmark data closer, we see that all cpu's are comparatively the same even the i7's vs Intel Core ll. Most, if not all vendors optimize in Intels favor

Intel's biggest (only?) advantage is hyperthreading; realize Windows 7 had to be optimized (how much more code?)for hyperthreading..how will Intel's i7's react in an openCL, CPUGPU environment (WARP) compared to Phenoms II's and an ATI graphics card, is it cost efficient(less code) and more efficient (faster) to go with CPUGPU over hyper..Will multicores do away with hyperthreading? These current comparisons on vista or XP do not necessary reflect comparisons on Windows 7 or DirectX 11. staytuned Reply

"Now once you start throwing in background tasks and look at future titles being more threaded then the picture becomes a little more muddy"

I dont understand where the writer is going with these conclusions. As CPUGPU or OpenCL begins to take hold, the old comparative model of simply looking at raw speed becomes obsolete, now, overall power can be reduced while concurrent events run parallel in multicores and GPU, thats is where AMD is heading. These comparisons with Vista may not be as eye opening as compared on Windows 7 or DirectX 11, this is where AMD planed to rock and roll from the start. Reply